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Control your music player with your eyes

New headphones enable hands-free operation

On April 1 2008, MusicRadar filed a report on the MusicMask, a new head garment that supposedly enabled you to control your music software by changing the expression on your face.

Sadly, this doesn't actually exist – the story was just All Fools' Day japery on our part – but now we've got wind of something almost as eccentric: a pair of headphones that enables you to control your portable music player with your eyes.

Developed and modelled by one Hiroyuki Manabe, a researcher at Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo, the cans enable the wearer to adjust the volume of their music by rolling his or her eyes up or down. What's more, you can skip to the next track by jerking your eyes quickly to the right.

As you can see, there's still some work to do on the design, but the headphones demonstrate that hands-free operation of our mobile devices is definitely on the roadmap.

That said, you'd have to be careful when and where you used these cans – fluttering your eyes in the direction of that big bloke who gets on your train every day might not be such a good idea.